The Junior Defenders

Writer-director Keith Spiegel's debut feature film The Junior Defenders is an amusing mockumentary about former childhood stars of a fictional TV show.

There's celebrity cameos galore, the best being that of narrator and cult filmmaker legend John Waters. How does that guy stay so svelte? Must be getting his protein.

There are uneven elements in the film, it has it's imperfections. But you can tell this is a labor of lust or love for the filmmakers. Even Kubrick's first flick had it's flaws, daddy-o.

But the flick has a hipster feel to it, like it was made for those who seriously dig off the wall cinema and weird ass quirky offbeat films.

Overall? Worth checking out.

This should have been a much shorter movie-- thirty seconds at most. Seriously, a few of the hundreds of visual gags work, and they probably add up to thirty ticks or less. They were going for the self-referential post-pop-populist de-deconstructionist sorta thing, but they failed horribly. It's obviously the audience's fault, though: the filmmakers, actors and everyone else involved were too cool for us, so their endless attempts at intentional humor go way over our heads, and the same terminal hipness also rules out any chance of us flyover types finding even a smidgen of unintentional humor in this eighty-one-and-a-half-minute-too-long epic.

What was Ally Sheedy thinking? Did she formulate any coherent thoughts at any time during the making of this movie?

And those superhero suits on the adult actors Are. Just. Wrong.

On a positive note, Peter Tork seems to be aging quite gracefully.

And-- this might be Pauly Shore's best movie.